Long, frustrating road led Harrisburg RBI baseball team to the World Series championship game

View full sizeCourtesy, Harrisburg RBI baseballJeff Baltimore was one of the leaders of the Harrisburg RBI team that played in the World Series in Minneapolis, Minn.

Many kids dream of playing baseball in a major league stadium.

But for Harrisburg natives and childhood friends Ray Burnett, 17, and Jeff Baltimore, 18, walking into the Minnesota Twins’ stadium to play in a nationally televised RBI World Series championship game was more than a dream come true; it was the sweet pinnacle of a long and often frustrating lifetime of lopsided baseball games played in sub-par facilities against superior teams.

This month, Burnett, Baltimore and the rest of the Harrisburg RBI baseball team represented the city at Major League Baseball’s RBI World Series in Minneapolis. RBI stands for Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities. Major League Baseball started the program in 1989 to promote the sport among urban youths.

Harrisburg was the smallest city represented in the tournament, but the team shocked the field by pulling off upset wins over 2009 World Series champion Houston and heavily favored Venezuela to earn a spot in the championship game against Los Angeles.

That’s how Burnett and Baltimore found themselves standing on Target Field. Harrisburg lost the championship game 10-0. Still, “Not too many people can say they played baseball on TV in an MLB stadium,” Burnett said. “Second in the nation? I’ll take it. We still accomplished so much as a team.

“No one even knew where Harrisburg was. We were the littlest city there. We put our city on the map.”

The Harrisburg RBI team has only been around for three years, but it has made monumental strides. The team went 2-1 in the Mid-Atlantic regional tournament in 2009, finished 2-2 in 2010, then as the hosts for the regional tournament this year, it blazed through the competition to finish 5-0 and clinch a berth to nationals.

“We’re the smallest market that made it to the national championships, and I think it speaks to the level of baseball players on our team and the amount of heart that our boys play with,” said coach Rob Martin, who’s also the Susquehanna Twp. police chief. “I think all of Harrisburg should be very proud of them. They represented the Harrisburg area and the city of Harrisburg in a magnificent way and made great strides to increase the popularity of baseball in Harrisburg.”

The Harrisburg RBI players have taken it upon themselves to raise the profile of baseball in the city. A tall task when you consider how drastically the sport has fallen out of favor with city kids.

“Everyone wants to be a basketball or football player. Those sports are glorified,” Baltimore said. “Even at [Harrisburg] High School, if you play basketball or football, you’re a top-tier athlete. But baseball is just another spring sport.”

Baltimore went through his own growing pains with baseball. He stopped playing at 14 to concentrate on football, but his father, who also played at Harrisburg High in the 1970s, convinced him to give baseball another shot. When Baltimore went back to baseball during his sophomore year, he realized how much he’d missed it. This fall, he will be a sophomore on the Shippensburg University team.

View full sizeCourtesy, Harrisburg RBI baseballRay Burnett vows to lead Harrisburg RBI back to the national tournament next year.

Baseball wasn’t always a second-tier sport in the capital city.

“Harrisburg was a baseball town once,” Baltimore said. “My dad told me stories of him playing with his friends. There were so many teams for all the different age groups.”

Things have changed. These days, it takes patience and a metric ton of emotional fortitude to be a baseball player in Harrisburg.

Little League is still popular, but at age 12, opportunities for play start to slip away. Kids gravitate to football and basketball, and this endures through the high school level, where playing for the consistently successful Harrisburg football and basketball teams is considered infinitely more respectable than hanging around the Cougars baseball team, which has tallied a 4-44 record in the last three seasons.

“Baseball is not the first sport anyone will choose,” said Burnett, who will be a freshman on the baseball team at Medaille College in Buffalo, N.Y., this fall. “You need someone else to throw a baseball with. Basketball, you can pick up a ball and go shoot [by] yourself.”

Baltimore said, “Pretty much the only baseball field in Harrisburg is at the high school, and it’s not that good a field. But there’s basketball courts all over the city, and football, you can play wherever.”

Persevering through years of losing streaks on the Cougars baseball team was hard for both players.

“There were times when I wanted to quit or go to another school,” Baltimore said. “Most of the games, we weren’t even getting to play full games because we were getting [the mercy rule invoked] so much.

“But I’ve been playing with Ray since I was 3, and we stuck by each other and got each other through it.”

Now Baltimore and Burnett can say they’ve played in a World Series game.

Baltimore will be too old to play for the RBI team next year, but Burnett is gearing up for a repeat appearance.

“We’ll be there next year. I’ll make sure of it. Losing that championship makes me hungry for the next opportunity,” Burnett said. “They’ll know where Harrisburg is this time. We’ll be back.”

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